“I am ready to scrap the blogs,” my boss told me. “I don’t want you to write because that is your job; I want you to write because you enjoy it!”
It reminded me of a website I had visited: SlowPlanet.com. As they themselves describe it, “Slow is not about doing everything at a snail's pace; it's about working, playing and living better by doing everything at the right speed.”
In one of their blogs, I read a post called Feeding my Literary Tortoise by Elise Collins.
In it, she mentions what she calls killing her literary tortoise:
Stage One: Expectations.  “It has to be perfect!”
Stage Two: Limitations. “It has to be done by 10 o clock!”
Stage Three: Obligations. “It has to be brown, square, dull, blegh…”*clicks on facebook*
Result: Overwhelmed Overthinker.
She goes on to write, “My mind loves to create obligations and starts thinking up a whole bunch of others to keep the original ones company. Ironically, I end up wondering why writing a blog on slow is proving tedious while a million thoughts race through my head. Blogging becomes that square, brown, dull box. My literary tortoise is sick.”
Coming back to my story, here I am happily typing away, humming to myself. Why, you may ask? Because what my boss said, was music to my ears. Moreover, my mind has not yet thought up any obligations and my literary tortoise is as of now, quite hale and hearty.   
When we do not answer calls, keep commitments, frequently change schedules, forget important tasks and neglect our family and friends, maybe it is time to step back and check what is going wrong. Doing a lot in very little time is not important; what is important is working efficiently and effectively.
If we set expectations we can match, we will be able to manage the pressures that life and work exert on us. One of my acquaintances is a great role model—he puts in 5-6 hours of dedicated work hours a day and then goes home to watch news, read, and generally relax. It helps that he is a news editor and whatever he reads and watches adds to his knowledge base. His boundaries are clear; he achieves what he wants and delivers high-quality work.
Of course, there are exceptions—on some days things go wrong or on others, such as when the budget is announced, there is more work. He works longer hours than usual only on those days. He might be less paid than his peers but he avoids ill health, stress and general dissatisfaction!
We see a lot of people doing what the hare did in the Aesopian fable—rush forward at great speed, leaving behind the tortoise in a bid to reach the finishing line, wherever or whatever that represents. However, the tortoise won the race in the fable, didn’t it? Just as Aesop’s hare, modern-day hares may also face failure because of the breakneck speed they are trying to achieve.
Let us do what we enjoy at a comfortable pace, knowing that we would accomplish what we set out to do, like the Aesopian tortoise. Let us be strong and healthy, but not to beat others.

If you are hoping for a managerial post in an IT company, this post is for you!

Fewer organizations are hiring “managers”, it seems. What is happening? What does it imply?

Recently, we visited a prospective client of ours—a leading global technology product company. We had discussions with their senior managers on the kind of people they are planning to hire. One of the first things they told us was, “We do not want people who want to be just managers”. Elaborating further, they said that they would want people to be hands on, do coding if required, define the specs, design, evangelize technology, and so on.

We have observed a similar attitude in other companies also. It is interesting that some of the requirements on job sites start with “You need to be hands on” in bold type.

Pure managers are out of demand. Companies want to hire middle and senior managers from outside only if they bring some value that the existing employees do not have. This could be in the form of technical depth or functional depth. If it is going to be for marketing or business functions, they prefer people who can really go out and win businesses. A manager who can just staff, manage the process, allocate work, monitor the team, perform appraisals, monitor deliverables, and ensure process compliance would not be enough. Someone who says that I am managing a 30-people team and am looking at managing a 50 or 100-people team is definitely at a disadvantage in finding job opportunities. There might be any number of pure managers available within the organization, and given that there would be more than one team member vying for this manager’s position, organizations have ample choice. They would not want to fill this position from outside.

Less of management; more of engineering, technology, function, and business is in demand!

Economists of all hues and shades would agree on one issue. It’s that the india story is generating this level of global interest mainly because of its sustainable competitive advantage : the demographic dividend. And if it sounds like jargon, rest assured it’s nothing more than the advantage our country has in terms of a large population of young people (in the working age group of 15-64). The 2007-2008 Economic Survey found that 68.4 per cent of the population will be within this age group in 2026, up from an already high base of 62.9 per cent in 2006.And that is saying a lot, when we compare it with the large sections of the older populace in China, Japan or South Korea, which will eventually erode the low wage advantage in many of these countries.

But will this necessarily turn out to be an advantage for India? No one can say for sure. Amidst this euphoria, a fact that we are conveniently overlooking is that this huge, young workforce could become more of a liability rather than an asset without proper, customized training at different levels of their career. In fact, this realization has set in rather late, going by the number of freshers who, after years of formal education, are branded brusquely as ‘not yet job-ready.’ by their employers. Where does the fault lie?

India Incorporated could do with a bit of introspection, too. Not too many in the corporate sector realize that the missing link that could make employees eminently job-ready is customized training—training programs that are structured not only taking the unique needs and cultural set-up of the organization, or the needs of different functions within the organization, but individual competencies and aptitudes, as well. And this applies not only to the entry stage, but to every stage of the professional life cycle. For middle aged employees it means crucial upgradation in their skills that could make all that difference between competency-building and redundancy.

The benefits of multi-level customized training are obvious

• Higher productivity at all
• For freshers, it means better integration with the company
• For mid career employees, it means crucial upgradation of skills
• Higher Return on Investment (ROI) for the organization
• Awareness on the part of employees about a company’s specific needs and culture
• Cutting down in terms of time and expenses on ‘one-size-fits-all’ training that is not relevant to all employees
• Gaining an edge over competition

And these are just some of them.

There is another reason why there needs to be a tectonic shift in human resource training. While the fast-changing and competitive global markets have seen mercurial  business cycles and short product life cycles for some years now, post-recession, ongoing employee development and up-skilling has become even more of an imperative as organizations penetrate into new markets and try to extract the maximum value for the capital they have ploughed into operations. For this, they need to recruit employees who can hit the ground running. That formal education cannot deliver the goods is now a reality. That is where flexible training modules come in. Their objectives supplement formal education, filling in the gaps in soft skills such as communication, leadership, initiative, aptitude, practical know-how, workplace realities, and other areas where formal education contributes next to nothing.

Industry analysts talk about the feverish haste with which the corporate sector is now tying up with training institutions to cope with changing needs. A very major challenge today is the breakdown of the traditional top-down model in the corporate sector, where earlier, freshers, after entry, had all the time in the world to take over gradually from their seniors. After the recession, ‘gradualism’ has become history. Add to this the ability variance across teams, regional disparity challenges from the opening up of non metro markets and the heterogeneity of geographically –dispersed  employees, and it should not be difficult to understand why divergent customized training solutions are such a necessity-- even internally-- within organizations that are cross-cultural, at all levels—from entry stage to a later stage, as well.

I am sure most HR folks in all companies would have had a tough time this April. While the world was enjoying IPL goings-on on and off the field with added masala this third version. HR would have been having their nerves tested. Appraisals and the subsequent compensation revision exercise is indeed a tough exercise.

When I look back I can recall varied kinds of experiences in this month. Some hilarious - some comments in the appraisal forms would provide the lightest of moments, some tense - "system crashed, last changes not saved, all the changes made in the last two hours gone", some frustrating - "that one manager is not sending performance ratings of his team inspite of the hundreds of reminders". There would never be a dull moment though.

Juggling with the Excels - vlookups, IFs, INDEX and so on. Invariably we would end up with more number of sheets than the number of employees in the company and fighting hard to figure which was the one we used last time. My head used to be reeling out numbers - employee codes, percentages, that mistake I made and need to correct first thing tomorrow morning. Maybe technology improvement also means doing more mistakes. Wonder how the Aprils were before the MS Office era.

And then on that day when the letters were printed, signed and given off was like completing the board exam in school, a great relief. But this exam unlike the board one would come back the next April.

In every organization and walk of life we find people whom we may call individual contributors. These are people who like to do things on their own. They want to create things by themselves. They want to crack problems by themselves. They may pick up a problem, think how to crack it, research related material, perform trials and errors and finally solve them.

The joy comes from being close to the problem and solutions. They need to feel and experience it. The electrician, the computer mechanic, the driver, the doctor, the painter are all individual contributors. In organizations too we find these individual contributors. However, in organizations because of its very structural nature, organizations grapple with problem of recognizing these individual contributors. At the workplace we find some of the good mechanics who come and say "I do not want to get promoted and become a manager, I prefer to work with the mechanical problems with my own hands". The joy and the challenge for them is to solve more complicated problems or create even more innovative models, designs, papers, layouts, ideas.

These people like to do more of these by themselves. We need the salesman who would want to sell by himself or herself. We need those surgeons who would do the surgeries by themselves. We need those musicians who create the music by themselves. We need those good programmers who like to write code. We need to identify these traits in people and give them the opportunity to excel by doing things on their own. I know a guy in my department - HR who is a very good recruiter. He is really good. He enjoys making those tough recruitment by himself. Sourcing people who will fit the profile, selling the jobs to them, understand and setting expectations, working with the candidate through the selection process and getting the person to join the company. I moved on. But I was told that he was made a recruitment manager with three other recruiters. He was miserable as a manager. He was not good at nor did he desire delegating to and controlling work of others. He was also not enjoying the job as he kept missing the hands on experience - making the end to end closures on recruitment.

We do find such people all around us. Some jobs warrant individual contributors. And such jobs are there in every function whether it is engineering or sales or HR or software development. Unfortunately in organizations difficulty has been in rewarding these people and their contribution. How do we reward a person without making him a manager. Actually the question we should be asking is how do we challenge the person in his job retaining the person as an individual contributor. To answer this question we need to ask what challenges the person. We go back to our simple theory of development of capabilities where we say that capabilities development is about adding new skills or improving proficiencies at existing level of complexity or moving to a higher order of complexity.

We need to assign them tasks or work or problems which may be of higher order of complexity. The flavour of complexity is different for different functions. Complexity in sales is different from that in programming. No matter which function we can identify the work related tasks or activities (short term and long term) which vary in complexity. We could challenge (and thus reward) these individual contributors by assigning them to higher orders of complexity. In the case of the person who was handling recruitment maybe we could move him to doing more complex recruitment and what could that be. Those that are difficult to fill, tough to head hunt or source or take long cycle for closure. To the salesman who likes to do selling by himself - maybe he could be moved to a territory where growth has been sluggish or a product which has not be moving. Or make him responsible for the niche, high value sales. Organizations will also benefit from their need to move to more complex problems. Not everyone needs to move the organization in the classical sense of "higher" level of responsibilities. We could think of "greater" level of responsibilities.

While every organisation believes in the importance of their human asset and would want to have an IS to manage their human capital, many are still without a good HRIS. We explore why this happens in this write up.

1. Cost: Some of the mature and the developed ones are costly. The product itself costs quite a bit. Added to this, are the costs of consultation for implementation - studying the as-is status, identifying the gaps and making the necessary changes.

2. Time drawn: Implementation takes a lot of time. Often the implementation overruns the deadlines. Then there are changes in the implementation team in the interim leading to further delays.

3. Infrastructure: They require the appropriate hardware and maintenance of the hardware. Procurement of the hardware goes through its process of approvals and sanctions. Then it requires the support of the infrastructure or the systems admin function to ensure the maintenance.

The three factors above together contribute to organisations not implementing HRIS itself. First, they vet the different systems available. Each one has its advantages and disadvantages. Second, given the cost and time one feels unconfortable in choosing one amongst the so many systems -what would happen if we make the wrong choice and the system does not take off after having spent so much.

But apart from the above operational issues there are more critical yet subtle issues.

4. Where is the value? - HRIS can be split into four parts - employee information, compensation & benefits, recruitment and the development parts (including the appraisals, training etc.). Evaluation needs to be done on one, the information flow and the intelligence or improvements that the systems may enable. Typically the first part i.e. information processing and flow works well for all the four HR sub systems. The workflows, rules, security, forms, UI, reports ensure that they work well. All the stakeholders get the information they want, approvals are handled correctly and controls are maintained. But then this is one part of the system. The other is the the core engine on which these work and what the core engine is supposed to do and how it does this. Take the case of compensation and benefits.

The core engine includes combination of statutory requirements (social security, tax deductions, contributions) and corporate rules (who should be paid how much, which component needs to be made how much). This core engine has the logic and provides the structure on which the compensation and benefits are calculated, governed and administered.
Because of this (mostly) well laid out structure and logic the implementation of compensation and benefits systems are easier to implement and results easy to perceive. Expectations of the employee information and the recruitment system are mostly from the perspective of information flow. There is not much of intelligence - logic based processing expected or needed.

Now the the development parts of the HRIS which include the performance appraisal, training etc. are trickier. They can add value only if they are able to contribute to development of the employees. Development of the employees can happen only if the system enable two aspects of any development - diagnosis and prescription. Diagnosis of one's potential, one's capabilities, one's performance. Prescription for what one's needs to do to develop one's capabilities, how the person can go about it, enabling and guiding the individual in this respect.

The development part of the IS fails because of this very reason - it is unable to play an effective role in the development by way of enabling diagnosis and prescription. The reason for this is because there are no standard rules (compare with the income tax rules). And when there are no rules there is no logic and when there is no logic no information system can be effective and so the IS fails as a development tool.

5. Complexity - When it comes to the development part of the system jargons are thrown in, different behaviour from what is normally followed is expected, sometimes it is too analytical and sometimes too "MBA" type. Essentially, simplicity is lost - simplicity which connects with every employee at every level. And so the natural resistance creeps in making the IS ineffective.

For all these reasons the "development" parts of HRIS do not take off. BUT there is a desperate need for such a development system. Every organisation and organisation management and leadership desire to have a healthy development system in place. If we were to do that then we would need to set some rules for the development. TDS is an initiative to overcome these issues and create a development tool to take the human capital in organisations to a higher level.

To know more about 3D Talent Development System (TDS) from TrainingOrbit please visit: 3D Talent Development Systems

TDS is an online system for complete cycle of talent development – skills profiling, training needs assessment and training fulfilment.

We at Training Orbit are happy to release 3D Talent Development System (TDS). TDS will be a boon to organisations. It is an online talent tracking and development system. It blends our intelligence in talent management with cutting edge technology. There are key activites which the employers can gain: skills inventory of its employees, training needs assessment and tracking, training fulfilment and tracking.

The system has been build around 3D Capabilities which is a wide and deep menu of skills across functions and industries. This makes it easy for any employee in any function and in any industry to map his or her skills profile. Further, we have incorporated our experience and understanding of training and development processes into the systems and the related workflows.

TDS is on a SAAS platform. It is hosted in a highly secure and dependable environment. There are no software licences to purchase and can be activated for use immediately. Being browser based is independent of geography or desktop/laptop. Finally it makes it highly affordable for employers – costs less than a dollar per employee per month.

TDS, we believe, is a simple yet powerful talent system which would enable organisation truly capitalise on their human capital. 

The other changes which we have made our portal include simplification of many of the pages – highlighting the key messages and offerings to the users. We have improved on the navigation within the site. We thank the users of our site for the improvements we have made. Their feedback and suggestions have been valuable.

With commitment to learn and improve

Yesterday I was chatting with CEO of mid size company in the IT industry. I was taking him through our product which we will be launching soon – Talent Development System. The important aspect of TDS is a powerful yet simple profiling of skills of employees in a company. Pre-loaded with skills in different functions across specializations within the functions we believe it is a cutting edge application which will enable companies to capture inventory of skills of their employees.

Suddenly he went silent during the discussion and after a while asked me – “Do you think organizations really care about skills and things like that?” I was little surprised with his question as I always felt that there was such a need for any organization. I asked why this question. He said “Ramu, you know every company fudges data on skills of their employees. When they present resumes to customers they fudge the resumes showing projects in the resumes which the employee has never done. I have seen and heard about these things even in large companies.” Thereafter we went to much deeper discussion of my own experiences.

But the fact that such a question came up makes one ask whether organizations care. I for one believe that yes they do care. Industries have changed in the last two decades. IT industry for one has matured significantly during this period. The HR practices in the leading organizations have evolved to create some of the best HR practices. These include inventorying and developing of skills. But having said that I believe that same level of maturity in the practices which one would find in the leading organizations may not be seen in the medium and small sized companies – which form the large portion of the industries. There are a number of reasons for this partly business driven, partly inadequacies of the HR function itself. But the question is whether organizations want to invest in the moving up the value chain. I firmly believe that organizations want to.

I for one believe that it is the not the headcount which matters but the inventory of skills these headcount possess that matters. Without having a proper scientific inventory of skills how can one manage a company when the fundamental driver of businesses is the talent of people.

I guess the problem is not whether organizations care for inventorying of skills but how do they do that. Well, our solution - TDS - should enable these organizations. Hang on, it is coming soon.

Training needs of individuals are closely tied to the career plan of individuals. One’s career plan may emerge from temperament or aptitude, aspirations and opportunities.

Opportunities can be viewed as those within the organisation and those outside the organisaiton. An organisation which is seeking to rotate its staff between different verticals or technologies or service lines gives opportunities to the staff therein to take responsibilities in new area. Or organisation planning to promote or give additional responsibilities (a larger team to handle, a bigger territory, a higher P & L) gives opportunities for one to develop or put to use ones higher levels of proficiency in those skills. Organisations which are having business plans to grow non linearly (through opening up business in different geography, starting new product or service line etc.) provide opportunities to individuals to get involved in different skills or further specialise or gainer richer experience in their capabilities.

Thus an understanding of the organisation plan does help in clarifying to one what the future opportunities for one could be and prepare oneself to capitalise on these roles. From a different angle the same becomes the responsibility of HR or managers/leaders in the organisation – providing visibility for the upcoming opportunities to their staff and helping them prepare to capitalise on the emerging opportunities.

The choice one would make with regard to the opportunities are closely related to the aspirations and aptitude/temperament of an individual. Career plan could be from different factors as has been described in the panch marg of career paths. The five themese therein include:

1.       Larger
2.       Deeper
3.       Wider
4.       Newer
5.       Different

1.       Improving proficiency levels in the current capabilities and/or
2.       Developing capabilities in new skills areas

Training needs emerge from all the above

In the 3D capabilities profile we have four areas of skills – functional/technical skills; behavioural or soft skills; business/managerial skills and avocational skills. One could explore various possibilities by drilling down each of these areas. One can see the wide range of skills in different functions and specialisations. These help in identifying areas one may want to get trained to further enhance ones proficiency in the said area and also identify the newer areas one may want to get trained in.

The greatest joy of an entrepreneur is I guess seeing the first rupee for his/her venture come in. Surely it is for me.

It gives me immense joy to see the first rupee come in as revenue for our venture. Enterpreneurs live in a dream world where they toy with that idea which they think is unique, will grow, gain recognition and bring money. Some start building on the idea, travel a distance and then realise it has not just worked and resign. A few others, struggle even further, not giving up. Many see them as crazy, impractical and failed to doom. Nevertheless they go on with hope and determination. Then somewhere down the line there is that glimmer of hope. Hope of a new horizon. Hope of crossing that crucial inflection point. This point in an enterpreneur’s journey is the point when he or she sees that first rupee as revenue.

There can be no greater joy for an entrepreneur.

This point is significant in one very important way. At least that is the way I see it. This point is significant because it is a recognition that the world sees value in the idea that the entrepreneur came up with and built on – and thus they are willing to pay for it. Every entrepreneur believes that his or her idea is great. But he or she can be “successful” only if there is an alignment between “that” within the entrepreneur and “that” perceived by the world or the end users. Most often such alignment would take lot of time – lot of time for the entrepreneur to understand the behaviour of the world, their perceptions to his or her idea, making changes in the execution without losing sight of the vision, - lot of trials and tribulations. An entrepreneur needs to let go of some, ready to subject to scrutiny ones assumptions, ready to keep moving. The world - the customers are right. The entrepreneur is also right. But it takes time for the “rightnesses” to match. And then when the “rightnesses” match there can be that nuclear fusion or a take off. This is “that” crucial point in an entrepreneur’s journey.

Today is that great point in this enterpreneur’s journey as we see the first rupee come in. A long journey of two and half years it has been. Glad that we have reached that point where our internal effort is aligned to the external needs of the world.

What would happen after this point? I do not know as I have not experienced it yet. Hopefully something good. But it can’t be better than this moment.

With my gratitude to all those who have stood and stand by me.

With love to my dear Thalaivar to whom I dedicate this joyous moment.